Summary of the 12th MEX: sensory interfaces, context aware UX, new form factors & better user research
By Marek Pawlowski Mobile as the new old For me, this was the first MEX where ‘mobile’ – understood as a device alone – started to feel traditional and old. From the outset in 2005, the heart of the MEX community has always been in the mobile technology industry, but it feels like we’re evolving [...]
MEX Sessions: Peter Whale on principles of context aware UX
Summary Peter Whale came to MEX in September 2012 with a deep understanding of the technology enablers for creating context aware experiences, but his talk also focused on translating these possibilities into 4 very human design principles. Building on knowledge gained leading product management at Qualcomm, Peter’s talk examines how sensors, chips and software is [...]
MEX Sessions: Sabrina Majeed on context aware UX
Summary Sabrina Majeed came to MEX in September 2012 to share practical lessons for building context aware digital experiences. Using knowledge acquired during her time working on social TV start-up Miso, Majeed’s session explores different methods of understanding user context and, crucially, how to build a user experience which succeeds even when very little is [...]
Sensor overload
I’ve just been speaking to the guys at InvenSense about some of the sensors that they’re working on. This prototype watch makes Nike’s fuelband look like a bangle. It monitors a finer level of motion and orientation along with ambient conditions like light and humidity. This means that devices can make better guesses about context [...]
Augmentation without the cyborg
What would the digital experiences which today are central to users’ lives look like if they weren’t embodied in a touchscreen slate? Google’s Glasses project provides an obvious answer by virtue of the fact it has been much in the news recently. The interest around smart watches at Mobile World Congress might provide another clue. [...]
MEX Sessions: Louisa Heinrich on context aware UX
Summary Louisa Heinrich came to MEX in September 2012 and challenged participants to think differently about context aware UX. In particular, she questioned to what extent contextual digital experiences properly reflected our innate human flaws and how we might design for these. MEX revisits the theme of context in Pathway #14 at the next MEX [...]
Reporting the future of mobile UX from MEX 2012
The 11th international MEX set out to define best practice and create new ideas in 6 Pathways – Diffusion, Concurrency, Sensation, Context, Clarity and Speed – each focused on a specific aspect of mobile user experience. Exploration of these Pathways began some months before in essays and conversations among the MEX community. The 19th – [...]
A winning context
MEX Pathway #14 is our ongoing exploration of context aware user experience, something we’re working on closely with Qualcomm. One aspect of the Pathway examines the contextual relationship between humans and the machines trying to understand their behaviour. In an attempt to identify how users think about their own context, we asked the MEX community [...]
The day the world talked back
Contextually response digital experiences (the subject of Pathway #14) rely on information about the user’s world. The quantity of this information is increasing, with new sensors emerging to track and inform. Two that have caught my eye recently are Koubachi’s plant monitor and TWINE, a Kickstarter-funded product able to sense everything from when a washing [...]
Context next
The first step towards building contextually responsive digital experiences is to establish a baseline of quality achievable even when there is no contextual information to respond to. As paradoxical as this may sound, the very nature of mobile devices and wireless networks is such that there will always be times when the ideal data to [...]
